The consumer sorting is often not very good and requires multiple bins with a higher capital and operating cost for storage and collection. It's a pain for the users. Single stream trash is the way to go with robotic sorting is the way to go. No reason it can't scale. Amazing work, one of the best uses of labeling and machine vision I've seen to date.
I have experience in commercial recycling and was about to post something with dim details, but this comment says what I was about to say roughly. It is hard to read comments from people with good intentions but zero experience in commercial recycling. Single-stream versus household sort is one of the most basic choices of any municipal recycling program. Every operation has waste, flaws and mistakes, single stream or not.
Excellent human sorting as you find in Japan or Switzerland is rare. Of course it is desirable. Pre-sorted inputs are not perfect in those jurisdictions, and rare in most other places.
The comment above lauds the technology here and I agree. Sorting a recycling line is a terrible kind of job for the majority of adults, and economics make the implementation worse in many cases. De-facto, it is the handicapped, children, prisoners and starving people that sort trash in most of the world. 1st world machinery with the right economics are an improvement in almost all cases, especially where food waste might be involved.
I'm wondering what happens to the woman who collects bottles in my neighborhood for her son's wheelchair when this technology comes to the third world.
That said the local garbage dump is encroaching on a refugee settlement, if it was something that could help it encroach less on that maybe it's a good thing.
It's not necessarily a pain for the users. It's a cultural thing. If you can change the culture, it's easy to do it with humans at the source. I'm in South Korea now and they sort all the garbage before even throwing it out. Different bins for different types of plastic, styrofoam, tetra pak containers, cardboard, glass, organic waste, etc. My brother-in-law, his kids, and I will take the garbage down and put it all into the right bin. No complaining, everyone thinks it's the proper thing to do. Makes it super easy to process each type of garbage correctly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_in_South_Korea
South Korea didn't do it this way in the beginning. When I was in China a couple of years ago, they were just starting to process their garbage this way, though it'll take a while for them to really do it well. The interesting question is why it's so hard to get the west to handle things this way. I don't know Europe, they might be better, but I know North America, and wow, the people in North America really don't care about this kind of stuff in general.
Again, I'm not sure of that. They feel that it's the proper thing to do, so I'm not sure they view it as painful. I hate to say it, but it feels like a disparity of maturity. Some kids do their chores because they're responsible kids, take their responsibilities seriously, are proud of being responsible, and view kids who aren't similarly responsible as immature. Other kids hate their chores and do their chores in spite of their hate. Both kids are facing obligations, but their emotional reactions are different.
It's nothing to do with maturity, don't be patronising. They feel that it's the proper thing to do because it is the proper thing to do if you don't have good centralised sorting.
If you do then centralised sorting is clearly better all round. It's less work for people, collection is simplified and more efficient, you don't have issues with people missorting, you can sort into more categories, etc. etc.
So nobody in the world has good centralised sorting. That's our reality. So what does that imply then as to people not wanting to deal with the pain of presorting? You say that it's the proper thing to do in that reality. I'm welcome to using a word other than maturity to describe the phenomenon if you can suggest one. I'm not married to that word.
> So nobody in the world has good centralised sorting. That's our reality.
Yes. That's what people are trying to solve.
But that's irrelevant. Your original comment was claiming that manual sorting isn't a pain because it's the proper thing to do. That's just nonsense. It's the proper thing to do (for now) but it's also a pain.
Would you have said washing clothes wasn't a pain in the 1800s? It's basically the same thing. Something annoying that you have to do because the technology to do it automatically hasn't been invented yet.
I think this is overly getting into semantics now. But if we must, when I was a child, cleaning the floor was a pain. As an adult, not cleaning the floor creates the pain, having a clean floor is great, and the act of cleaning itself is just a natural thing to do, just as breathing and sleeping is. Natural acts aren't painful. I think a border gets crossed for those who can make something natural. For people just getting started exercising, exercise is painful. For people who exercise regularly, exercise is enjoyable. In fact, I recall one Olympian Simon Whitfield saying that his body would experience pain if he didn't exercise.
Perhaps different people also have different thresholds for pain. I'm not sure people in the 1800s would have thought, "Gee, washing these clothes is such a pain, I wish something could be invented to do it for me." I think they rather would have thought this is just a natural part of life. Perhaps the super rich who could afford servants could have the luxury to afford such thoughts. I'm betting many people in the 1800s wouldn't have even been in that headspace.
Again, you said that presorting is the proper thing to do in a reality without centralized sorting. At this moment, I can't really think of anything that I'd consider both "proper" and "painful" if I have managed to seriously make my mindset consider that thing to be "proper". Before making the switch, I would consider it "painful", yes. Looking at the before and after, I can only see maturity being the dimension that really changed. Maybe commitment is another word that could be used too. But if I really think about it, I think commitment would be so heavily moderated by maturity to the point where it might as well override commitment in terms of effect. Again, I'm open to alternative words if any can be suggested.
Nice story. Laws and regulations are broken all the time, but only used/prosecuted very rarely when the circumstances are egregious and the parties are pissed. E.g. violent criminals in jail have committed 10-30x more violent crimes than the single one they have been convicted for. Similarly most minor infractions go completely unnoticed and unreported because no one cares. The laws are are there to make things prosecutable and punishable. But they are not there. You can operate many businesses completely outside the law without running into any problems as long as you are courteous, unnoticed, and do no harm. You respect the laws in spirit, but not in practice. E.g. you don't do all the paper work, but you also are a good citizen and respect the rules in spirit if not in practice.
>You can operate many businesses completely outside the law without running into any problems as long as you are courteous, unnoticed, and do no harm.
The problem with this is that if you're doing it enough to make a living off of (i.e. not a side gig) it makes you a massive target for enforcers looking to issue fines. And there's always the Karen who'd rather narc on you than politely ask you not to do something that you didn't even know was pissing them off.
Yeah. One of our other neighbors ran a tutoring side business out of her apartment, which was technically illegal but of course didn't bother anyone and went unnoticed.
Often times you see rules that are broad, but really intended for a specific thing. Like the example you gave, making it illegal to run a business from a private residence. That rule was never intended for the tutor, it was intended for the noisy neighbor running a mechanic shop out of their garage.
We could decide to dig big inland seas using nuclear weapons. We'd essentially create Mediterranean Sea habitat across southwest by bringing up the Gulf of California (what forms Baja) at Puerto Penasco and creating lots of internal coastal areas with ready access to fresh water. I would guess it could take 5-10 years for the earth moving, and 20-30 for detox, and 20-30 more years for habitat re-equilibration.
Maybe he could control much more twitter stock through friendly shareholders. e.g. I buy $1B of Twitter stock with money I borrow from Elon and pledge those shares to elect Elon's board members and what not. He'd just need 4 friendlies, and they don't even have to be billionaires.
What can we collectively do to help Musk take control of twitter? Are there are any GameStop short-squeeze strategies here?
If the reactors are on, destroying any of the infrasture around it can be devastating. The reactors need external power to operate. If external power disappears, the reactors now need emergency power from diesel gen sets. If those fail due to any reason, the reactors will probably melt down - unless they have already been off for quite a while (~weeks would be necessary). If the reactors melt down, the VVER has both a core catcher and a containment. That's not bad and much better situation than Chernobyl. But other things may go wrong such as a pressure failure and potentially related control rod ejections that could cause the temperatures to rise and pressures to become higher than what the containment can handle.
The surrounding war environment, the stressed operators, etc mean that any of these failures are now more likely. It is reaonsable that external power will not be available, it is possible the gen sets will fail, it is possible the operators will do something stupid.
To put it simply, warfare is not a design basis accident for current light water reactors like VVER-800.
Yes, the power plants now need a stable supply of electric power or diesel for cooling in coming days, weeks and months as they have been shut off last night. A failure of cooling is what lead to the newclear disasters in Fukushima.
The chain reaction can be shut down in a matter of seconds. However, the reactor continues to generate a huge amount of heat for weeks afterwards. It's not as much heat as a fully-running chain reaction, but it's still enough to cause a catastrophe if cooling is not kept running - we're talking multiple megawatts of heating here. The cooling requires an external power supply. It was the failure of this external power supply that caused the problems at Fukushima.
There are newer reactor designs that are specifically engineered to be capable of cooling themselves on shutdown without an external power supply. However, most reactors in the world do not have that capability.
Your link supports the comment you are replying to; it says that after the reactor is shutdown, additional cooling is needed for some time, and that eg the Fukushima and Three Mile Island incidents both involved damage done by an inability to cool the reactors after they were already shut down.
No they are technically correct. In the reactor world "shut down" explicitly and specifically refers to chain-reaction-running mode. The reactors do still require active cooling for several days+ to avoid plant damage scenarios. Several comments on this page seem to not have a clear understanding of this difference.
Once the chain reaction is shut down - there is basically no way for the reactor to come alive (chain-reaction-wise) again on its own - not even if it's being bombed, shelled, etc. And run-away super(prompt)critical reactions are not even possible with this reactor design. These reactors are water-moderated - which means that water is used to slow down neutrons to increase their reaction probability. As the reactor heats up, the water gets less dense (even if it is still a liquid) making it a less effective moderator - this density decrease is enough to passively/automatically keep the reactor in a shut-down state. Residual decay heat from radioactivity of the fission byproducts post-shutdown is enough to damage the reactor internals for several days - hence the need for active cooling post-shutdown.
I've seen lots of crazy-exaggerated news reporting on how "bad" or "dangerous" this entire situation could be. It's not good, but neither is the war in Ukraine. It's not even remotely possible for this to be anything like Chernobyl, and I think unlikely to be nearly as bad as Fukushima (which in the grand scheme of the Tsunami - wasn't really that bad). In the war context, I don't think this nuclear plant situation is particularly notable beyond it providing a large fraction of Ukraine's power.
I truly hope the same measures will be taken against US or other nation's acts of aggression in the future. e.g. Yemen, Afghanistan,Iraq. This is a great precedent to set.
How can they distinguish good from bad justifications for aggression? Russia's current actions seem to be at one extreme, while, say, responding to an attack from another government would be on the other extreme (barring extenuating circumstances), while the US usually has an (ostensible) justification somewhere in the middle.
Afghanistan after 9/11 is a good of example of something that was hard for another western nation to argue against the justification for starting (how it went is another story).
> How can they distinguish good from bad justifications for aggression?
On a case-by-case basis. As you note, the international community probably wouldn't have reacted against the US regarding Afghanistan (and probably should have regarding Iraq).
Be aware that most people cannot read Chinese or Russian, and as such their whole world perspective is fed by an one sided narrative.
I suggest you listen to these[1][2] talks, and Putin's speech[3] on NATO expansion in Munich in 2007. Pozner[1] pointed out that up to 2007, Putin really tried to be friend with the West, including asking to join NATO.
I made no reference to good aggression, only justifiable aggression. Even then, while it would be fine to form an argument that no such thing exists, it's unrealistic to despise the man who returns a punch.
As for Russia's reasonable concerns about the West and the nigh-impossibility of objectively or thoroughly observing foreign points of view - both are true and important, yet neither serve in the least to justify attacking Ukraine's capital.
According to this person he didn't ask to join, he asked why he wasn't asked to join, and wanted to skip the process that countries-that-don't-matter have to go through.
> Putin's speech[3] on NATO expansion in Munich in 2007
Ukraine would never had joined NATO because it was an active war zone anyways. Putin didn't have to do anything to avoid Ukraine joining NATO.
Listening to his current explanations for the invasion doesn't make him sound like a good guy no matter the language or the perspective.
> Putin really tried to be friend with the West
And relations were relatively good until he decided to invade Ukraine, he just severed every diplomatic bridges and every single chances of progress for the next decades(s).
Putin's not the Devil but he clearly is the aggressor here. Ukraine was a sovereign state with a democratically elected government. You'd be hard pressed to use the "b-bu-but it's both sides" rhetoric here.
>Ukraine would never had joined NATO because it was an active war zone anyways.
It does not prevent NATO from supplying weapons and training the Ukrainian army. The US reconnaissance planes have conducted regular patrols over Ukrainian territory. The British even tried to build naval bases in Berdyansk and Ochakovo. And with active and heated territorial disputes it's easy to see a hypothetical scenario of Ukraine trying to re-capture Donbas and Crimea by force after it felt it's sufficiently strong or Russia is weak enough, like Georgia tried with South Osetia.
>And relations were relatively good
I suggest watching the following videos if you want to learn about alternative points of view:
That sounds great until you figure out that Putin has a reason for everything. The problem is not so much Putin, or even his viewpoint that Russia doesn’t feel safe (I can even see the merit of such a stance) , but the fact that is that he is not accountable to his people.
If he was a normal president and with a functioning democracy, I doubt we would even be at the current situation. I saw the videos of Putin with his advisor (the Spy chief) and that was an exercise in “tell me what I want to hear.”
Being accountable to the people didn't stop the leaders of the US from engaging in plenty of acts of agression and territorial expropriations these past 230 or so years.
And I wouldn't be terribly surprised if most Russian voters will end up approving of the invasion provided Russian casualties and costs don't get too high.
That’s not the point really I tried to make (sorry if I was being unclear). I have a choice to (try at least) vote out the president who starts wars if I don’t agree with it. I could protest freely and massively on the streets. There is no such option in Russia. If I was a Russian citizen that fact alone would be cause for concern.
The US leaders are way more reckless than Putin. The difference is, as pointed out in the lecture in one of the videos, that it's in a incredibly secure position in an unipolar world.
US foreign policies have been a series of failures without any real consequence save for 9/11. No one is gonna sanction the US nor start a war with it.
The us attacking Iraq on false pretenses was clearly unlawful. Afghanistan is different, but would appreciate other views. Tthe country (and bin Laden and others) were clearly behind 9/11. Do you see it as possible for there to be a legal or lawful war between countries when one attacks the other?
Saudia Arabia attacking Houthis and Yemen seems like a clear illegal action. At least the ongoing attacks.
It is dark comedy indeed to see Russia’s apologists defend their actions with whataboutism about the US war in Iraq. Guess what, we think that one was illegitimate too. Good work throwing the Ukraine invasion on the pile of unjust wars. Bush and Putin can sing a Nuremberg duet together.
Imagine Russia ousted Treudeuo for crimes against peaceful protestors (freezing bank accounts without trial etc) as occurred this month in Canada. He then sends weapons and trainers to Canada to build up resistance and military installations in Canada, perhaps even offering a treaty for Canada to join Russia as military defense allies. This is basically what the USA/Europe did in Ukraine in 2014 (McCain and company was there and USA spent 5B on NGOs overthrow democratically elected leaders of Ukraine and helped install pro US gov).
100x civilians died because of the war in Afghanistan, which was mainly planned in the US. Looking forward to disagreeing with your Afghani twin about the justification for invading and occupying the US for 20 years.
Please stay on topic. I'm arguing that the war was justifiably initiated because the US was responding to an attack that killed ~3,000 of it's citizens.
I thought I was. It's not justifiable to bomb and invade a whole sovereign nation to capture a few criminals. Especially if that nation is willing to negotiate their extradition for a fair trial. Just like it would not be justifiable for Afghanistan to bomb and invade the US now because a few criminals "tortured some folks" and killed 1000s of its citizens who had nothing to do with 9/11.
The US was in Pakistan right after 9/11 though, marines and staging bases and everything. They didn't invade, because they had assets already there and Pakistan let more in.
>people being informed of what is really happening in closed-off autocracies and dictatorships from the first-hand accounts
This extends to democratic systems as well. It seems as if a veil has been lifted on the workings of governments and corporations because information and reporting is no longer processed and packaged by a compact, semi-corrupt media system or fourth estate. No one is going to believe a Weapons of Mass Destruction lie anymore, few are buying into the Ukraine crisis etc, multiple government dissenting views on Covid have proven to be accurate despite censorship and banning. Time scales are shortened, information leakage is everywhere, distribution avenues are many orders of magnitude larger than they used to be, and people really do have a lot more time to look at and think about things. It seems like we are just now more aware of the crap that is happening at large corps/govs.
There is a fifth estate now – a formidable alternative to legacy media, of small and independent, more numerous and interesting, analysts and interpreters of the world and human affairs. This is enabled by more easily usable social media – it is twitter/YouTube/podcasts. This is special and new and I am thankful for it. Now, we have to diminish the negative addiction and consumption effects that these same systems can have.
I suspect these systems do not actually need that much money to operate and manage, and can eventually be treated as water/energy utility type businesses - regulated to fixed profits and with anti-addiction rules. This is no longer advanced technology.
Perhaps a component of this perception is that these technologies are exposing a rotten tree stump that was already there. You only think it's making things worse because you couldn't see it was already bad.
But only part of it. The mental destruction out there is real.
